Mark Wilson

It's been a while since an Asus product has rocked our world—we think the last time must have been the Eee—but the Atom-powered SSD-based Asus S101 looks amazing for its price—even better than we thought before. Just 2.2lbs and a tapering .7 inches thin (a bit thicker than the Air), its 10.2" LED screen runs at WSVGA (1024x600) resolution. And with 802.11n, ethernet port, Bluetooth, multitouch trackpad, 4-in-1 card reader, 20GB of free online storage and high quality speakers, the S101 packs plenty of useful features—though it only has 1GB of RAM and appears to have the same fatal flaw as the MacBook Air. Yes, the S101 uses a non-replaceable, 5-hour polymer battery. OK, now that we're done with the specs, how much does the thing cost? It's just cheap enough to be exciting, but not quite as impulse-buyable as the original Eee.16GB SSD, 16GB SD, Windows XP $699 32GB, Linux $699 64GB, Linux $799 The only catch is obviously that XP is not included in the better configurations. But still, if this rendering is in any way accurate, it looks like Asus may have knocked one out of the park, again. [HardwareZone]